Hollywood Reporter: The Path to 9/11 - review with production credits [View All]

By Ray Richmond

Bottom line: An elaborate, provocative -- and some say misrepresentative -- depiction of the events that led to the devastation of Sept. 11.

8-11 p.m. Sunday and 8-10 p.m. Monday
ABC

That this two-night miniseries has turned into far more than a mere fictionalized lead-up-to-Sept. 11 rehash has grown increasingly clear over the past few days. It's now an incendiary political football that has sent the buzz meter racing throughout the blogosphere for its purportedly skewed depiction of events. That it also happens to be powerfully acted, artfully produced and shot like a truly riveting page-turner is sure to be overshadowed by the controversy it is generating.

Presented by the network without commercials over five hours (8-11 p.m. Sunday and 8-10:02 p.m. Monday) for what had been pegged originally as a six-hour project, ABC's "Path to 9/11" lays much of the blame at the feet of a priority-challenged President Clinton and CIA director George Tenet for not taking out Osama bin Laden when given the chance.

Yes, it was the Clinton administration's inattention to, and dismissing of, the Islamic threat that made everything go so terribly wrong -- a scenario that might have some truth to it but can't be as black and white as portrayed in this narrative, which is drawn from "The 9/11 Commission Report" in tandem with two other published sources, according to the credits. The producers (including exec producer Marc Platt and lead producer-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh) took liberties that ABC this week justified by pointing out that this was "a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources."

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